The Big Bang fails another test

The ‘background echo of the big bang' was supposed to cast
a shadow—but only if it is really true that this radiation is coming from far away.

15 September 2006

One of the alleged ‘proofs’ of the big bang model of origins is said
to be the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This is claimed to be the ‘afterglow’
of the original ‘explosion’.

I previously reported1 that there
was found to be a correlation between the relatively cooler spots of the 2-dimensional
surface temperature maps of the CMB and the locations of galaxy clusters and superclusters.
Since the source of the CMB radiation is supposed to be the putative big bang fireball,
this correlation indicates that at least some of the important features of the CMB
maps are related to the galaxy clusters themselves.

According to theory, the big bang fireball should be the most distant light source
of all. Thus all galaxies would be in the foreground of this source. Therefore all
CMB radiation must pass the intervening galaxies between the source and the observer,
here on Earth. This radiation passes through the intergalactic medium, between the
galaxies in a cluster, and is scattered by electrons, through inverse Compton scattering,2—the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich
effect (SZE).3 When
this happens, the path of the CMB radiation is interrupted and distorted.

More woes for a big bang history of the universe. Another problem for those Christians
who hang their apologetics on the beliefs of so-called modern science.

The previously reported (2004) analysis by Prof. Shanks of the University of Durham,4 showed that there was such a
strong correlation of this effect that it could be disputed that the CMB radiation
contains any information at all from its distant source. This was because the alleged
70 µK anisotropies (unevennesses) that were claimed as a prediction of the
big bang theory, and claimed to be the seeds of galaxies, could instead be attributed
to this SZE effect. They also reported that if it could be shown that this SZE was
indeed the cause of the cooler regions in the CMB temperature maps out to one degree
from the centre of a cluster, then it would be very damaging to the idea of the
source being in the background.

Now (2006) it has been reported and published in the Astrophysical Journal5 that indeed there is strong evidence,
out to at least one degree from the cluster centre, of an anomalous cooling. This
new work looked for a shadow in the CMB radiation cast by foreground galaxies and
compared the predicted shadow to what was expected from the SZE. However the expected
cooling due to the shadowing effect of the galaxy cluster was found to be deficient
by about 100 µK and well within standard errors. For example it might have
been expected that the foreground cluster would cast a 150 µK shadow (i.e.
would be cooler by this amount) but only 50 µK was observed. This analysis
was averaged over 31 clusters observed with a net result indicating that on average
no shadow was detected. In fact, the question is asked, Why are the clusters so
relatively hot? Is there an additional source of emission that cancels out the expected
shadow?

This was reported in ScienceDaily.com under the headline Big Bang’s
Afterglow Fails Intergalactic ‘Shadow’ Test.6
A team of University of Alabama Huntsville scientists, led by Dr. Richard Lieu,
used data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to scan
the cosmic microwave background for shadows. Previous groups have made these sorts
of studies but this was the first with WMAP data. Remember WMAP was designed specifically
to detect the signature or echoes of the big bang. But… ‘Either it
(the microwave background) isn’t coming from behind the clusters, which means
the Big Bang is blown away, or … there is something else going on,’
said Lieu.

The evidence seems to be mounting7
in favour of the source of the CMB being local instead. This favours a galactocentric
creation model, one in which the Milky Way galaxy is somewhere near the centre of
the universe, as has been strongly suggested by other observational data. See ‘Our galaxy is the
centre of the universe, “quantized” redshifts show’.8 And it also seems that physicists are using
the data from the precise WMAP measurements to undermine the very paradigm that
it was built to bolster.

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References and notes

Compton scattering means that a photon collides
with an electron, imparting some energy to the electron which recoils, while another
photon carrying the remaining energy (so a lower frequency) is emitted at an angle
from the original so momentum is conserved. Inverse Compton scattering means that
a very energetic electron loses energy, so the scattered photon has a higher
energy and thus higher frequency. Return to Text